The first official screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's decent novel is the equal of 'Nosferatu' in every respect – like that film it's hammy, boring, dated, sluggishly paced and has an overrated central performance. Although the film is constantly praised for its visual style, Tod Browning's direction does nothing to open it out from the stage play on which it's partly based, preferring instead to bore us with a series of agonisingly static scenes in which characters stand about in rooms doing nothing.<br /><br />This movie may have given cinema an iconic character in its visualisation of Count Dracula – every kid ever to do a vampire impression has used Bela Lugosi's accent – and the film is undeniably influential, but, like Boris Karloff's creature in the same year's similarly overrated 'Frankenstein', Lugosi has very little to do besides stand still and stare a lot while someone shines a torch in his eyes. Like Karloff, he's given better performances in better (and worse) films than this.<br /><br />He fares better than the rest of the cast, though. Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing has the unenviable task of slogging through lumps of dialogue about the vampire mythos and Dracula in particular, convincing the other characters with very little effort that Dracula can transform himself into a bat and a wolf. Helen Chandler and David Manners, as the lovers whose romance is rudely interrupted when Dracula bites her on the neck, are as bland as you like and fail to make you care about them. Everyone else is either the cockney comic relief so beloved by '30s horror writers or overact so chronically that it makes you wonder how this was ever considered scary.<br /><br />There's one good bit where a couple of characters are musing about who could be responsible for the neck-bite deaths and the next words we hear are 'Count Dracula' as the maid shows him in. Aside from that and what charm Lugosi can muster up in his one-dimensional role there's not much to it. I've never been a huge fan of this story but surely there are better versions out there than this one; with the stolid cast, the bats on strings and castle Dracula done up like a students' Halloween party, nothing here has made the transition from 1931 intact.